Lunch at Trattoria Lafiandra

This was a happy accident. I wanted to lunch at Food for Thought at SAM @ 8Q, but it was closed because it was "Full House", according to a sign outside. Well I should have taken yesterday's packed room as a sign. So we ended up at this Italian restaurant called Trattoria Lafiandra in the main SAM building, which, according to their poster at the entrance, was voted by hungrygowhere as one of the Top 10 places in Singapore to have pasta. We ordered 2 pasta dishes and shared them.

Tortelloni ripieni di funghi e formaggio (Home made tortelloni with mushrooms and cheese in gorgonzola sauce): This was rather rich, but not nauseatingly so, because the gorgonzola had quite a sharp taste to it. It's probably my favourite cheese, and I was rather surprised when I learnt that it's a blue cheese, whose smell I'd always associated with rotting trash. Well I guess one should never generalise.

Gnocchi di patate al pomodoro fresco (Home made potato gnocchi with fresh tomato sauce): My first taste of gnocchi, I think. This tomato-based dish was a perfect match with the cheese-y tortelloni. The gnocchi's like a savoury, less chewy version of muah chee. Very nice. Only gripe is that it could have been served on a white plate instead of a pink one, so you couldn't really make out the colours of the ingredients. Wonder if they'd run out of white plates.
And for dessert, tiramisu, which you can never go wrong with, in my opinion.
I don't know why I found so many people blogging about negative experiences at this restaurant. My previous two pasta meals almost had me swearing off pasta completely - linguine at Modesto's had too much pork fat; spaghetti at Pasta Shop (OK this is by Sakae, so technically Japanese) had too much garlic. This place definitely regained my interest and confidence in restaurant pasta.

Dinner at Jin Wee, Siglap

Just had dinner there with my mother and cousin. Been a while since I last went there. Everything still looked more or less the same this evening - the retro decor, the homey food, the rather large dinner crowd. When we sat down at the table, I realised there had been one change. Whereas before you had to listen to the waiter/waitress reel off the dishes to decide what to order, they now had a laminated menu displaying the dishes on a double-sided A4 paper. "What an improvement," my cousin remarked. Jin Wee's the Hainanese kopitiam equivalent of Chin Bee Chin further along the East Coast Road. People love it because it's stubbornly, stalwartly old-fashioned and unchanging. You come back here years later and find it exactly the same as it was before.

Here's what we ordered.

The trademark pork chop with tomato, onion and potato in tomato sauce. My cousin prefers the one at Han's though.

Fuyong omelette. I didn't know this came with shrimp. Are fuyong omelettes supposed to have shrimp in them? Except for the shrimp, this was a classic comfort dish. Additional note of interest - my grandparents used to have the same plates as the one the omelette was served on.

Claypot tofu. Another classic. It was still steaming hot long after it was served.
Sambal long beans. Everyone's unanimous favourite dish of the evening. We took a vote after dinner, and everyone named the same dish on the count of three. The secret is in the sambal sauce, just the perfect mix of savoury and spicy.
Hope to find the food still as comfortingly yummy the next time I return to Jin Wee for a meal.